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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27224623">xx; The Black Prince</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Theo_Thaur/pseuds/Theo_Thaur'>Theo_Thaur</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>31 Days of TUA Whump [20]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Umbrella Academy (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Medieval, Alternate Universe - Pre-Canon, Gen, Hurt Number Five | The Boy, Number Five | The Boy Whump, Number Five | The Boy-centric, Pre-Canon, Pre-Season/Series 01, Whump, Whumptober 2020</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 20:47:01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,464</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27224623</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Theo_Thaur/pseuds/Theo_Thaur</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Whumptober 2020 submission. No 20. "TOTO, I HAVE A FEELING WE’RE NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE": Lost, Medieval.<br/>-----<br/>Assigned a job for the Temps Commission that lands him in the mid-1300s, Five faces aspects of who he was as a boy.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>31 Days of TUA Whump [20]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1951234</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Whumptober 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>xx; The Black Prince</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>TRIGGERS: medieval battle, death, mentions of the black death, gore/injury.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>xx; The Black Prince</em>
</p><p>August 24th 1346 CE, Crécy-en-Ponthieu</p><p>      The English were outnumbered, significantly so. Five stood atop the hill of which King Edward III had stationed the infantry, more nearest the back, close to a stone mill. The countryside land was rolling, dotted by a few small towns that had provided the sources of English raids, and stays for the French soldiers --Estrées, Wadicourt, Fontaine. The River Maye cut through the fertile lands to the south, serpentine. </p><p>      The English side, knights had sat upon horseback, armored in plates. Behind them a line of archers, welding longbows somewhere between five and six feet long, to his estimation. Five would learn them to be incredibly fast, the skilled ones able to notch and shoot an arrow before he could tie a shoelace. Three arrows could be shot in the time it took a Genoese --that's to say, French--, crossbow to fire one bolt. But the archers were patient, waiting only until a wave of French got within nearer range, past the knights, to send a wall of heavy oaken arrows, which were clearly capable of plunging through armor.</p><p>      The French, Five suspected mismanaged, came in uneven hoards. They made easy targets for the archers perched on the hill, surrounded by trenches. Arrowheads dug into heavy plough horses like knives. The French had no choice but to continue into the aim of arrows, because barricades of men and wagons flanked the sides, and the English backed against a marshy forest. At first it had been surprising, watching the French draw so close, until surely the crossbows were in range, but then and only then were the archers ordered to start an accurate volley of arrows, which could be sustained until no Frenchmen stood.</p><p>      He took his cue when it came, in the late afternoon sun he slipped down the hill, with shield, helm, sword, and banner. It was Five's task to step in for Richard Fitz-Simon, and perform the job he would've, had he not deserted. Five did as this entailed, siding with the young Black Prince in his tirade down towards the French, what Five would label as an act to get the attention --or respect-- of his father the king, who sat unarmed near the mill and watched. The Black Prince fought bravely with the support of the group he commanded, moving past the heavy line of English archers, but within an instant a wave of French were down on them. The French were more poorly armoured, in stiff cloth and leathers, wielding pikes, lances, and axes, but they rallied to their own cries, and the faint noise of a few drums and trumpets.</p><p>      The prince was struck from his horse, falling to the ground in a tangle of limbs as the English tried to resist the sheer numbers of the French. It was a shitshow, one that did not go unseen by the king, but was allowed. The prince had yet to earn the right to be knighted. Five set down the symbolic banner briefly, drawing his weapon and clashing. He hadn't handled a sword in some time, but he had the reflexes to make it work, and avoided the urge to blink around in front of the medieval soldiers. Some habits died hard. A pike struck him in the side, which he had neglected to notice in the constant surging of people around him. Five didn't give himself the time to fully react, pulling out the barbed tip of the long pole, which had pierced through the primitive armor and St. George's flag, which he'd torn on his tunic. He continued fighting, until the strategy of the British overwhelmed the wave. It was then Five called out for reinforcement, which came. As was all planned. The Black Prince would live to command a few more battles, the timeline was preserved. Five drew away from the fray as best he could, having left his briefcase in Wadicourt for safekeeping. Crude canons, the first to be used on French land, fired, and the noises of men and startled horses continued on. He made no attempt to cross into the land between the two, turning behind the English to descend into the marsh, before question might be raised as to who had saved the prince. When alone, Five performed a spatial jump that landed him in the safe outskirts of the small market village. </p><p>      Five clutched his side, bleeding out against the white of the tunic. He didn't think it had gone far enough to pierce anything major, and unlike a bullet, it didn't travel all the way through his side. Just a flesh wound. Five stumbled through the empty town, shaking the helmet off his head because it annoyed him. In what was called chevauchée, some of the buildings had been burnt down by the English, to strip the French of resources and sow fear. There were easier ways out, Five was aware. He could attempt a jump back to the Commission, recieve medical care.</p><p>      Knowing all of this, Five was too scared to go back without the briefcase, not feeling confident enough to tear a hole through space and time, to get into the Temps Commission bubble. Five had worked a few jobs before, but his former inability to jump during the apocalypse was not lost on him. Years and years of failure would do that to a person. He was incredibly aware that if he stepped out of line, it jeopardized not only his job, but his ticket out. Screw that even, it put at risk his chance to see people every day. He needed to do everything right. He needed to work quickly and figure something out before the sun set, so Five could re-appear and returned the briefcase approachably, calmly, and <em>professionally</em>. </p><p>      There were teams of people that worked in the Commission specifically to locate misplaced briefcases, although those briefcases were not often accompanied by a living agent. He could have left it, with little medieval consequences, but he didn't want to, he wouldn't tolerate anything short of a success.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>    <em>   "What you don't want the job?" The Handler had asked, when he'd requested to meet her.</em></p><p>
  <em>       "It's not that. I'm an assassin. I thought there had been a mistake when I was assigned to save the life of a prince."</em>
</p><p>
  <em>      "Picky, aren't you?" She teased, tapping the cigarette holder against her lips. "You've shown a knack. Why are you afraid to broaden your horizons?"</em>
</p><p>
  <em>      "I haven't worked earlier than the 1800s, and I've only done a small handful of jobs."</em>
</p><p>
  <em>      She laughed. "Yes, but don't you want to see how far you can take yourself? And depending on how you look at it, this isn't so unusual for you, playing hero…" Five had neglected to make a remark on that, purposefully. He didn't need a reminder that the fate of twenty-nineteen was still unchanged. "I'm not asking you to fit in. Just don't stick out. This isn't a long mission, you have one objective. And try not to contract the plague, if you can help it."</em>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>      He'd get his hands on that briefcase, and then he'd be gone. Everything was alright. Five surveyed the damaged buildings, the screams of men not far, but dwindling by the minute as the English overtook the French. All the French needed to stop the fighting was surrender, to lower their banner, the Oriflamme, and give quarter. There would be no other way to avoid slaughter. But it wasn't his job to minimize the deaths, nor was it his concern. He'd caused plenty of his own, if the French wanted to charge out --leaderless by now, no doubt-- and die in fits of struggle of anger, that was their choice. Not his. It was war.</p><p>      Five struggled amongst the wreckage, the feeling beginning to dawn on him, that perhaps the area he'd hidden the briefcase, was now under half-charred wooden beams. The briefcase, although still referred to such for ease, was not actually a technical briefcase, but a woven basket covered over with canvas, typical of a field worker --like what one would find in that area of France, for the time. It was encumbering, and he hadn't wanted to risk it being destroyed in battle, because the concealed technology inside was still delicate. The safer choice had been to stow it near a pasture.</p><p>       Five abandoned his shield fairly quickly on, combing through the remains of where he'd thought he'd left that basket. What if it had been crushed?</p><p>    <em>  "And try not to contract the plague, if you can help it."</em></p><p>      He thought about those smug words as he looked through the town carefully. From a young age, every academy member had been to some extent, taught history as part of basic education. It hadn't been the standard details, not precisely. Reginald had focused their learning on great tragedies. It had once given Five the impression that history in and of itself was a bleak, horrible thing. He hadn't understood for a long time why they had to know about large massacres, failures, and deep moments of sorrow felt by large groups. A more hopeful person might've guessed it was to teach them empathy. But, as an adult, able to see the past laid out, he didn't think so. Five suspected Reginald had wanted to make them feel guilty about events they hadn't lived through or caused in any way, manufacturing an impulsive heroic desire to fix what they could fix, and make up for things that had not been their faults at eight years old. Not that it mattered, not that there weren't far more pressing matters than Reginald being a terrible father to a group of children. But they had learnt about the plague, among other subjects. Five knew the fiercest wave would soon bear down upon Europe.</p><p>      A particular excerpt they'd been made to read during their studies of the plague had scarred him as a boy, and still haunted him. </p><p> </p><p>      <em>"At every church, or at most of them, they dug deep trenches, down to the waterline, wide and deep, depending on how large the parish was. And those who were responsible for the dead carried them on their backs in the night in which they died and threw them into the ditch, or else they paid a high price to those who would do it for them. The next morning, if there were ma ny [bodies] in the trench, they covered them over with dirt. And then more bodies were put on top of them, with a little more dirt over those; they put layer on layer just like one puts layers of cheese in a lasagna."</em> --Marchione di Coppo Stefani, The Florentine Chronicle</p><p> </p><p>      A great danger would befall these people. One that paled in comparison to the losses of this battle. He almost felt bad for them, but it was supposed to be that way, for the timeline. That was what Five had to tell himself, after he'd learned that knights did not triumph like they did in the small number of fantasy books he'd gotten his hands on. The people in that field too, were little more than fleshy people in plated armor. They could gray with age, or die without reason. Life worked that way.</p><p>      He took a deep breath, tried to push past the wound on his torso and keep looking. The town was small, but he didn't have the strength to move away every stone, every beam.</p><p>      As a boy, he'd once read about a folktale surrounding the black death. It was the closest he'd gotten to true fairy tales after Reginald had discovered his fixation to works of fantasy. A Scandinavian folktale depicted an old lady, named Pesta --plague, literally, in Norwegian. The hag travelled, visiting homes and leaving death in her wake. It was the best explanation they'd had, that a quiet woman seamlessly killed rooms of people, cruelly and violently rising to a great and inescapable power… immortal.</p><p>
  <em>      "And try not to contract the plague, if you can help it."</em>
</p><p>       Where was the briefcase? Five was beginning to worry he'd put it in one of the small, other nearby towns. Perhaps that was his hope, because he was afraid to acknowledge that a crushed woven basket might blend in well beside hay and other staples of a rural life. It could've burned, been reduced to ash. Would a Commission 'briefcase' be able to accomplish that? Five found himself crouching down, pawing through wreckage and trying to lift away what he could, though large chunks of clay and wood were difficult to move. The sun was setting, it wouldn't be long before he was in the dark. Five knew he should leave, he wasn't a fool. Unlike any others at the Temps Commission, he <em>could</em> choose to go, if he only took that chance and ran with it.</p><p>      But he couldn't bring himself to. Not without the basket, or at least without knowing the basket was too damaged to save and put back. Hastily, carelessly even, Five blinked to Fontaine. He sorted through buildings that still stood, and ones that had cleanly been burnt by the thatched roofs. Five just kept going. At some points he stopped feeling that pain in his side, because his fear of being taken from the Commission and put back down into the apocalypse was so much stronger than a mere wound. His hands were coated with ash and he gave himself splinters as he threw boards off to the side, heart hammering in his chest. His hands shook and for a while had made good pace, rummaging through one pile and moving on when nothing came, searching for areas that looked familiar, because he couldn't have so terribly underestimated his ability to retain basic information, like a sense of where he'd put the basket before the burning and ransacking. Right, dammit?!</p><p>      Five wasn't as young as he'd once been, he was tiring himself, sweating despite the way the air was cooling as the sun sank into the horizon, casting gold to indicate the last slivers of hope. His head felt like it was splitting open and at last he sunk against the wreckage, needing to take a break. He stared up at the sky; the moon hung over him, but he nearly hadn't noticed. Waxing crescent. Five closed his eyes, bringing a hand to his side to clutch at it, forgetting the way his hands were covered in dark ash because everything looked different than it should in pale moonlight.</p><p>      It was ironic, wasn't it? Digging through collapsed buildings in search of something that would free him, like he was a boy again. Five wanted to go back to the Commission, but he was so, so tired.</p>
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